I don't know if this is a feature of OS X, but I am getting quite bored of make_ext.pl being rerun every time "make perl" is run, see below. It only takes couple of seconds in this box but it's still pretty dumb. In slower/older boxes starting miniperl 101 times (I counted) is not just dumb but outright painful. $ make perl ./miniperl -Ilib make_patchnum.pl Reusing 'git_version.h' and 'lib/Config_git.pl' ./miniperl -Ilib make_ext.pl ext/ExtUtils-Miniperl/pm_to_blib MAKE="/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make" LIBPERL_A=libperl.a Running pm_to_blib for ext/ExtUtils-Miniperl directly ./miniperl -Ilib make_ext.pl cpan/Archive-Tar/pm_to_blib MAKE="/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make" LIBPERL_A=libperl.a ./miniperl -Ilib make_ext.pl dist/Attribute-Handlers/pm_to_blib MAKE="/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make" LIBPERL_A=libperl.a ... Running pm_to_blib for cpan/version directly ./miniperl -Ilib make_ext.pl DynaLoader.o MAKE="/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make" LIBPERL_A=libperl.a LINKTYPE=static CCCDLFLAGS= make perl 4.81s user 1.18s system 95% cpu 6.269 totalThread Next